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Tomb Raider reboot scribe Rhianna Pratchett has remarked that 2013 was a "pretty good year" for female NPC and protagonist characters, and she hopes for less 'shooting in the face' on exotic new worlds.

The industry needs to be "expanding its verbs" when it comes to interacting with new worlds, acknowledging the "heavily entrenched" guns aren't going to go away. Industry still needs more diversity.

Although she regards last year as 'pretty good' it's still not an equal playing field for females, but she notes things are improving. Overall, both genders 'could use some work'.

"The industry isn’t going to ditch guns anytime soon. Not completely. They’re just too heavily entrenched. However, I do hope it starts expanding its verbs and finding new ways for players to interact with worlds, characters and game mechanics. From a gamer perspective I can’t help but think that it would be nice to sometimes travel to these amazing, exotic and imaginative locations, and not have to shoot the locals in the face," Rhianna Pratchett told IGN.

"As for the ‘men’ part – Again, I think 2013 was a pretty good year for female characters, both NPCs and protagonists. Although in gaming terms ‘pretty good year’ means that there were some, and they were cool, interesting and well thought out, rather than anything approximating equality."

"As well as more female protagonists (and antagonists) I hope we start to see a broader spectrum of representation in age, ethnicity, sexual and gender orientation and ability. You only have to look at TV shows like Breaking Bad, Luther or Orange is the New Black to see how popular a bit of diversity (or as I like to call it, ‘real life’) can be."

"On top of that, I still think there’s a lot of scope in broadening the way games approach depictions of masculinity, which is still extremely narrow in scope. It would be nice to see a panel about gender in videogames and it not just be about one gender! Because, frankly, they could both use work."

She was responding to the question: 'How long are we going to keep telling variations on stories about 'men with guns' in the mainstream space?' Recently Rhianna Pratchett revealed she hasn't been asked to pen the Mirror's Edge 2 script, despite having crafted the original - although this was largely savaged by DICE cutting our Faith's dialogue.